Petra's Great Temple: Virtual Petra - Archaeology Magazine Archive


Virtual Petra	"Petra's Great Temple" Summer 2000

Soar through the Great Temple, exploring every cranny as it may once have looked and examining artifacts in situ. This amazing virtual world was designed by graduate students at Brown.

After the movie downloads, click the play button or scroll bar to view. [4 MB]
Click here if you need Quicktime.

The Colonnaded Street behind you, you stand before the Great Temple, dwarfed by its tremendous size. A camel waits out front for his owner to return.

Now you are hovering above the Temple, counting its columns, admiring the beautiful, paved court.

Suddenly, you are walking across the hexagonal paving stones you admired from above. Up the stairs you go, from the Lower Temenos to the Upper Temenos, where you feel as insignificant as a bug beside the soaring columns.

Then, you are inside, winding your way to the back of the Temple. Artifacts hang suspended in space at the very points where they were found.

You are standing at the very top of the Theatron, taking in a breathtaking view of the Colonnaded Street below, then you head back down the steep stairs.

Now you fly over the Colonnaded Street, eye to with the Temple, and home again.

Learn the lay of the Temple complex.

Click here for Brown University's SHAPE lab website.

Major funding for this project comes from NSF/KDI Grant #BCS-9980091, "3D Free-Form Models for Geometric Recovery and Applications to Archaeology."

Instrumental in the creation of the Archave Project have been:

Eileen L Vote
Graduate Student, Department of Old World Art and Archaeology, The Shape Lab, Brown University

Daniel Acevedo
Graduate Student, Computer Science Department, Brown University Brown University

David Laidlaw
Stephen Robert Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Brown University

Martha Sharp Joukowsky
Professor, Center for Old World Archaeology and Art and Department of Anthropology, at Brown University